Microsoft Recall feature in Windows 11 creates Privacy Concern
Microsoft introduces Recall feature in Windows 11. The Recall system component regularly saves snapshots of the customer’s screen and stores them locally. It uses screen segmentation and image recognition technique to understand visibility in the screen. Each snapshot has a UserActivity associated with it. A UserActivity refers to something specific the user was working on within your app. For example, you are using music app then the useractivity could be updating playlist, changing the song etc.
Recall feature provides semantic search on the saved snapshot and helps to retrieve the image which user has worked on and relaunch the context. Application developer can now offer their users additional service where their app users can search the snapshots and retrieve the context what they have worked on in the past.
Recall uses Windows CoPilot Runtime available in the operating system that utilize AI, such as Phi Silica, the Small Language Model (SLM) created by Microsoft Research that is able to offer many of the same capabilities found in Large Language Models (LLMs), but more compact and efficient so that it can run locally on Windows.
Microsoft recent announcement creates a stir in social media. Elon musk tweets about it saying, "It is a black mirror episode from Netflix"
This is a Black Mirror episode.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2024
Definitely turning this “feature” off. https://t.co/bx1KLqLf67
Recall stores application snapshots on user's device and it is personnel. Your snapshot is yours and it will not be moved to Microsoft cloud. You can always delete and manage the privacy of the snapshots.
AI is evolving and there are few good and bad things user has to experience. Overall concern is to keep user's data and privacy safe.